Back in the saddle again
Hello everyone, Vince Venturella here and I wanted to take a few moments to share the journey of designing this game. As you may or may not know, game design has been a passion of mine for almost two decades now. In that time, I had great fun creating multiple role-playing games and consulting for Wizards of the Coast (I was even lucky enough to be one of 8 consultants who was able to work on D&D 5e from its initial days and see it to launch). However, the last game I published was in 2014.
Over the last seven years, my passion has not ebbed in any way and I got to do some fun things such as make a Mordheim 2.0 for early Age of Sigmar, but no single project grabbed my attention. An important thing to know about writing a game is that it takes an incredible amount of work and mental effort, passion about the project is absolutely essential and nothing was really meeting the bar to light the fire. That is, until Adam came to me with an Idea about demons fighting for supremacy in the ruins of Hell. Our initial conversations really excited me as we quickly came to the idea that these demons would be fighting for something, their philosophies defined them and shaped both how they were fighting and the unique special abilities they would have, but more importantly, the why they were fighting. I have always found that in miniatures games, it’s so much more interesting when you know what your little plastic people are all about and the world they are trying to affect through bloody battle.
I have played miniatures games for more than 20 years and enjoyed a wide variety of games in that time, but this was the first time I was actually writing a full wargame from scratch as opposed to bolt on rules for an existing system. It was wonderful to be able to have this amount of freedom, but as always, we started with our guiding principles: we wanted a skirmish style game with people piloting 5-10 figures, we wanted fast, hard, skull-cracking brutal combat where killing an enemy mattered in an immediate sense and most importantly, it was designed from the beginning for campaign play where the demons would power up over time as their story evolved through your games.
I am confident you are really going to enjoy what we’ve created. In doing our playtesting, people grasped the basic rules quickly and were able to get straight into the combat and begin conquering Hell quickly. It’s been a long road, and now comes one of my favorite parts of the journey – getting it in your hands so you can start playing. I hope you all enjoy your time in Hell.
